The use of surveillance cameras continues to proliferate for a variety of applications including private security, homeland security, crime detection, traffic management, crowd control, border control, weather condition monitoring and military applications. A set of surveillance cameras being operated in coordination is typically used to provide situation awareness at a system level. The video information from a plurality of cameras may be forwarded to a central control location where the information is available for viewing individually, as a composite and/or built up on an overall site map.
It would be advantageous if methods and apparatus were developed which provided situational awareness at a local site level of interest, e.g., to an individual emergency responder close to or at the site of interest. The plethora of surveillance cameras being installed can potentially provide a centralized system monitoring station with a very high level of overall surveillance, e.g., within a metropolitan area. However, as the number of cameras increases, the amount of bandwidth needed for supporting concurrent video output feeds to the central control site increases. Video feed resolution can be reduced to allow for a larger number of concurrent camera feeds; however, this tends to limit detection capability at an individual site. There can also be significant communication delays between an individual camera output feed and the central control node site. In addition, there can be significant processing delays in coordinating and/or processing information from a plurality of cameras onto a centralized site map.
It would be advantageous if the feed from an individual surveillance camera of interest to a particular local responder could be fed directly to that local responder without having to be fed through and processed by a central control node. It would also be beneficial if a camera's output feed could be selectively switched on/off in response to detection of an event, thus limiting the use of valuable limited bandwidth, e.g., air link bandwidth.
Many surveillance cameras are placed at a fixed geographic location. It would be beneficial is methods and apparatus were to make use of that knowledge of local surveillance coordinate information in providing a local responder with additional information, e.g., an additional stream of information providing a local site map overlay with GPS coordinates.